ABSTRACT
Issues concerning norms and normativity are pervasive in the contexts of human activity and institutions. Of course this includes criminal justice contexts. In addition, a discussion of normativity generally will be a helpful background for the later discussion of moral considerations. Criminal justice has multiple, significant connections with social, political, and economic considerations and that makes many issues of criminal justice unavoidably normative in morally significant ways. For example, the relation between criminal justice and distributive justice can be recognized as highly important, whatever one's political commitments happen to be. Likewise, there are numerous perspectives on what considerations should be the basis for criminalization and what is the justification of criminal sanction. It is not difficult to see that those issues involve normative considerations including some moral considerations. That is unavoidable in a context in which the state intentionally deprives persons of liberty and imposes burdensome, undesirable conditions on people while at the same time important rights are to be respected.
